Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology
It has been a while since I scribbled anything on here but I now have a few things to relating, starting with this one. Amazon now promotes a different app for use when reading its eBooks on PC’s and, with a certain reluctance, I have taken to using this because its page synchronisation is not as good as it should be.
Another irritation is that it does not open in a maximised window and it scarcely remembers your size settings from session to session. Finding solutions to this sizing issue is no easy task so I happened on one of my own that I previously used with Windows (or File) Explorer folder shortcuts.
The first step is to find the actual location of the Start Menu shortcut. Trying C:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Amazon\Amazon Kindle should do that.
Next, right click on the Kindle icon and choose Properties from the context menu that appears. In the dialogue box that causes to appear on the screen, look for the “Run:” setting. By default, this appears as “Normal Window” but you can change this to “Maximised”, which is what I did before clicking on Apply before doing the same for the OK button to dismiss the dialogue box.
If you have pinned the shortcut to the taskbar or elsewhere, you may need to unpin it and pin it again to carry over the change. After that, I found that the Kindle app opened up in a maximised window as I wanted.
With that done, I could get along better with the app and it does put a search box in a more obvious place that it was in the old one. You also can set up Collections so your books are organised so there is something new for a user. Other than that, it largely works as before though you may to hit the F5 key every now and again to synchronise reading progress across multiple devices.
In a world where write access to a folder or directory is controlled by permission settings at the operating system level, a ready answer for when you get the above message in your log when creating a SAS data set would be to check your access. However, if you are working in Windows and your access seems fine, then SAS’ generation of an access error message seems all the more perplexing.
Unlike the more black-and-white world of UNIX and Linux, Windows has other ways to change access that could throw things off from the straight and narrow. One of them, it would appear, is to right-click on the file listing pane in Windows Explorer and select “Customize this folder…” to change how it appears. The strange upshot of this is that a perpetual read-only flag is set for the folder in question and that flag triggers SAS authorisation errors. The behaviour is very strange and unexpected when you find it, and the quickest and easiest solution sounds drastic. This involves deleting the folder and creating a new one in its place, saving anything that you want to retain in another temporary location. An alternative approach uses the attrib command and is less invasive.
It begs the question as to why Microsoft is re-appropriating a flag used for access purposes to be used to determine whether the HTML components of a folder display have been changed or not. This is very strange stuff and does not look like good software design at all. With all the other problems Microsoft creates for itself, I am not holding my breath until it’s fixed either. There seem to be other things like this waiting to catch you out when using Windows SAS and a good place to start is with SAS’ own description of the problem that I have just shared.
When Microsoft moved away from its two pane file manager with the advent of Windows 95, I was one of those who thought it a retrograde step. While two Windows Explorer instances can be tiled on a desktop, the old two pane paradigm still has its uses and there are third party purveyors of such things. Salamander from ALTAP is one such option as is SpeedProject‘s SpeedCommander. I have been using the latter for most of a year now and I would gladly pay for it but for the fact that SpeedProject’s payment system isn’t working. It’s just as well that the demo continues to function fully following expiry of its evaluation period. It even takes the twin pane paradigm further by adding sub-panes within each of these but that isn’t all to this major update to the Norton Commander concept. Recently, I downloaded the free version of Salamander to take a look and, though basic, it does a lot of what I ask of it so I might continue to see how it performs and may even evaluate the commercial version to see how it goes.